Put together by those at Mean Astronauts, Console Labs and Playway is a new entry in the Robin Hood universe.
This time, Sherwood Forest’s favourite outlaw son has decided to eschew the whole “live in a tree and spend all my time attacking the Sheriff” approach to the story, and has instead decided to take a leaf out of Steve from Minecraft’s book, building a lovely village for the Merry Men to live in. And, as we are Robin in Robin Hood – Sherwood Builders, that means everything from urban planning through to chopping trees down for wood comes under our remit.
Can this fusion of construction and adventure possibly work? Or does Robin Hood – Sherwood Builders end up as a bit of a mess? Well, strap on your best bow…
We’ll start off with the story of the game, which is pretty much as we all know. Robin comes back from the Crusades to find not only King John on the throne, but the Sheriff of Nottingham oppressing people left right and centre. And so he does what any self respecting noble would do – sticks a bag on his head (well, that’s what it looks like) and then heads off to live in a forest. As the game opens, we are in the forest, in our new village – how things play out is pretty much up to us.
Moving on to the presentation of the game, and here the news is somewhat mixed. Robin Hood – Sherwood Builders is predominantly set in an open world representation of Sherwood Forest, and we are free to wander about and explore to our hearts content. This is the good news – the world is large, full of things to find and to do, so there is no shortage of people to help and new followers to recruit.
The less good news is that this open world comes at a cost, and the graphics are about on par with what an Xbox One could do back in 2015 – there are no whizz bangs or graphical horsepower on display here. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as long as the gameplay is up to scratch, but that I will cover later.
Frankly though, Robin Hood – Sherwood Builders looks tired, graphically, and the sound isn’t much better. The actual fighting sounds are okay, the clash of blades and swoosh of arrows, but the dialogue is something else. The accents on display are hysterical, and not in a good way – I met one baddie who was doing what I think was meant to be a Scottish accent, but done by someone who had only ever read about the Scottish – it certainly wasn’t from any town I could name.
And even stranger, while we are on the subject of the presentation, are the tutorials – when a new one becomes available, a small notification appears on the screen, and we are invited to click the right stick to read more. Upon doing this, a screen full of what I think is Polish text appears, despite the rest of the game being in English. Things are not helped by the fact that the controls for the menus are clearly lifted straight from the PC version, and see us trying to steer a small pointer around the screen with the left stick. This is a really bad way of doing things, and makes things unnecessarily complicated. Not a promising start.
Surely things improve as Robin Hood – Sherwood Builders plays out though? Well, not really, but I’ll start with the base building part of the game.
As you’d expect having played Minecraft (everyone has played Minecraft!), if you want to build something, you have to first gather the materials for it. In Robin Hood – Sherwood Builders, that means wood and stone, basically, and also reeds weirdly if you want to make some buildings. ”No probs!” I’m sure you’re thinking, “I’ll head off into the woods with my trusty axe and chop some trees down. I’m surrounded by them after all!”. Well, you are, but you can only chop down the trees that the game deems you can. I have been stood next to two identical trees, and I can chop one down (it kind of glows green) and the other one I can’t touch.
Gathering stone is similar, actioned at a mine. Again, you find stone dotted around the place – but you can’t pick all of it up, only certain ones. Annoying, but we’ll let it slide. Just.
When we have the necessary materials, we can then go and build the village by standing at a certain table. It appears that town planning was very strict back in the olden times, as certain structures can only be built in certain places, and finding the correct place is a real pain. The blacksmith’s furnace, for instance, can only go in one spot – but it isn’t shown on the screen, you just have to drag the outline around the field outside the village until it turns green, and then build. The idea is that soon you have built a sufficiently large town to be able to train the inhabitants to do some of the jobs for you, and this glowing future is surely enticing, but it is stuck behind the drudgery of actually building the place, and this is a high price to pay.
When you get fed up with being a builder, there are missions to be carried out, as you look to get the people of the various boroughs on your side. These range from battering bandits, to attacking royal convoys, through to going to locations and freeing the inhabitants from the tyranny of the upper classes. The missions can be achieved in a multitude of ways, be that through skulking in a bush, sniping enemies with a bow, through to charging in with a sword and hewing away – the choice is yours.
Whichever path you decide to take, be prepared for disappointment, however. The aiming with the bow is rubbish, and the sights have nothing to do with where the arrow goes – gravity must have been stronger in the past, as the arrows have so much drop that even standing on a foe’s toes, you’d still best aim over their head if you want to shoot them.
Luckily, sword fighting is even worse – with no lock on mechanic, the sword fights usually devolve into rushing about, swinging wildly until someone is dead – with no real control on who that is going to be. I can’t overestimate just how poor the whole combat side of things is, and the whole feel of the combat is numb and lacking.
Robin Hood – Sherwood Builders sets out to be an action adventure RPG with base building elements. Unfortunately it fails on both counts. The building isn’t fun or intuitive, and the combat is imprecise, relying far more on luck than judgement.
There is a good game buried deep inside Robin Hood – Sherwood Builders, trying to get out, but the layers of nonsense over the top do a pretty good job of smothering it.
